Word: poorness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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CATV quickly caught on in other communities where reception was poor. Antenna builders soon noticed that if they made the towers tall enough, they could pull in signals from distant as well as nearby stations, thereby offering viewers greater variety as well as clearer pictures. But the road from Panther Valley to national prominence was long blocked by the FCC. Not until the 1970s did two events combine to broaden the cable audience dramatically: the FCC's first steps toward deregulation and, more important, the coming of satellite transmission. Since 1975, cable programmers (Home Box Office, a subsidiary...
...comunidades, many started by foreign missionary priests working among the poor, have sprung up during the past decade in virtually every country of Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina...
They are variously involved with the needs and wishes of Latin America's largest class, the desperately poor, the uneducated, the politically unorganized. In fetid Netzahualcdyotl, a slum of 2.6 million people that grows like a tumor on the outskirts of Mexico City, several comunidades have cooperated to help protest rising bus fares and appalling health conditions. Human feces lie in the streets. Contaminated water adds to the filth and contributes to a death rate of more than 50% among children less than four years of age. Before Pope John Paul II's visit to Mexico in January...
Winning such acceptance from Latin America's bishops has been no easy achievement. Often, says Bishop Anibal Maricevich Fleitas of Concepcidn, Paraguay, the comunidades have seemed a threat to more traditional Catholics because they want the bishops to be "brothers and servants of the poor." This stance, he adds, also makes them "like pepper thrown in the eyes of the government." In fact, scores or perhaps hundreds of comunidad leaders, both priests and laymen, have been imprisoned, tortured and even killed because of their "conscientization," awakening a sense of grievance, among poor people...
Ultimately, the future of the comunidades could well depend less on their theology than on whether they can avoid the appearance of being merely adjuncts of Marxist revolution in the hemisphere. For the present, the region's poor have the last word. Says Volta Redonda Housewife Sebastiana of the comunidades: "They are schools where we learn to be somebody...